Most online course sites will require some amount lecturing to help you get your students on the right page. Here are some tips to help you create effective online lectures that hold the attention of your students.
Prerecorded or Live?
The first thing to consider is whether you want your students to all gather online for a live (synchronous) session or whether you want to pre-record sessions for students to watch at their leisure (asynchronous). Each type of session has its advantages and disadvantages.
Use a synchronous session if:
- You want to use real-time activities like short-turnaround breakout groups
- You need immediate feedback from your students
- You need all of your students to pace together through an activity or lesson
Use an asynchronous session if:
- Your students can pace through the units or course material on their own
- You’re flipping a classroom and want to use a lecture to provide the first point of instructional contact
- Students are doing projects that can be structured, organized, or managed by the students with limited instructor oversight
- Your students need flexibility
- It’s ok for your students to skip or test out of content they already know.
Unless there is an outstanding reason to provide a synchronous session -- something you're doing that cannot be duplicated in an asynchronous fashion -- then we recommend pre-recording your lectures. Being able to complete schoolwork around one's own schedule is one of the biggest appeals of online education.
Design Lectures That Get Watched
Start with your objectives…and lecture as a last resort.
Before you begin to dive in and record lectures for every single unit, first consider whether the instructional objectives/learning goals of each unit can be achieved by other means. Here are some alternatives to lecturing that have been successfully used in online classes:
- Ask your students to work through a case study and share their conclusions and experiences in a discussion board.
- Have your students use a specified note-taking format like Interactive Notes, submit scans of their notes, and grade them complete/incomplete.
- Ask students to solve a puzzle or work with a new software and then address the challenges and successes with the experience in a student reflection journal.
- Ask them to participate in a debate or role-play in the discussion board and then reflect on it in a short paper?
- Ask students to define and illustrate key terms or concepts (I recommend starting this assignment by doing one first that includes a very bad drawing of the concept so the bar for your non-artistic students is set very low) and scan and upload them to a Wiki.
There are dozens of lecture alternatives that increase student engagement and promote a high level of thinking in your online course. If you need help thinking of activities to meet your specific learning objectives, please reach out to us and we can walk you through some alternatives.
In some cases, however, you simply have to lecture and that’s okay! Take another look at your objectives and begin to outline lectures that stick to the rest of these pointers.
Keep it short
3 hours of online lecture is too much. Studies show that students tend to zone out around seven minutes and are completely disengaged after about fifteen. Try to keep your lectures under fifteen minutes, even if that means you need to record several fifteen-minute lectures for one unit.
Keep your learners engaged
Pre-recorded lectures can and should still actively engage learners. For example, ask your students to stop, think, and write things down. Have them follow along with a sequence of instructions that you hand write on the screen. Include quizzes and polling in the middle of the lecture. Several of our lecturing tools include solutions for capturing these kinds of activities within the lecture. Another option is to use Blackboard quizzing and adaptive release to hang access to one video on the completion of a quiz on the previous. Use these tools to keep your students participating, rather than passively viewing.
Once the lecture is over, immediately connect the content to activities that will require them to use, apply, or reflect on the information. It’s helpful to remind them in the instructions to reference the lecture as they work on the task.
Keep it accessible
If you are providing students with video content, you required to caption or provide a transcript of that content. While a number of solutions are available, currently the best solution is to post your videos to the YuJa media library (which will provide automated captions that can be easily edited, if necessary), then embed them directly into your Blackboard course site.
The Tools
There are a number of tools available for faculty interested in lecturing online.
Synchronous tools: Collaborate Ultra
If you're running a synchronous session, Blackboard's Collaborate Ultra is the best tool to use. It has a wide range of features useful in education, including break-out rooms, on the fly polling, application sharing, and a digital whiteboard both you and your students can use. In addition to this, it is fully supported by the University of Detroit Mercy, meaning there's a good chance your students will have used the tool in a previous course. Collaborate sessions can also be recorded, giving students who could not attend the session the option to see (and hear) what they missed.
Synchronous tools: Office 365 Teams meeting
Microsoft Teams, which is a part of the Office 365, has an excellent live-meeting tool that can be used for conducting a class. You'll need to set up and enroll students in a Team for your class, but once that's done you can use Teams to run synchronous sessions that include live captioning and screencasting (showing students your desktop). Teams lacks the break-out rooms, polling, and participant management tools available in Collaborate. But for a fairly traditional lecture, Teams can be an excellent product. Recorded Teams lectures are automatically accessible to Team members through Stream.
Asynchronous tools: PowerPoint Record Slide Show
The desktop version of PowerPoint (in either the Office 2019 or desktop Office 365 varieties) is currently the best, easiest way to add narration (and annotation) to your slideshow. Narration is saved on a slide-by-slide basis, making it easy to add slides to or remove slides from an existing presentation (or re-record a single slide, if necessary). PowerPoint also allows you to incorporate your webcam into your presentation, if you'd like to overlay a video of you talking into your slides.
If your presentation style is more write-on-the-whiteboard than talk over pre-formatted slides, consider setting up a deck of blank slides and using a touchscreen PC when recording. If you don't have a touchscreen PC at home, CETL has a few available for faculty to check-out for this very purpose.
PowerPoint's recording feature can be launched by selecting RECORD SLIDE SHOW from the Slide Show tab.
Asynchronous tools: YuJa Desktop Software Capture
The YuJa Media Library includes full-featured recording software that can be downloaded and installed on your computer (PC or Mac). The tool lets you record up to 2 video streams, 2 audio streams, and 2 screens. It also includes an annotation tool that lets you draw over your screen(s) as you record. Once recorded, YuJa also includes a browser-based media editor, for making changes to your recording. Mac users and faculty who seek to record more than a PowerPoint are strongly encouraged to consider YuJa's capture tool.
Asynchronous tools: Office 365 Teams
A recorded Teams session can be used to pre-record online lectures as well as record run live sessions. A recorded Teams meeting isn't editable like a PowerPoint recording -- you can't re-record a slide of content or add a new slide of content at a later date. But if you need to do a lot of screen-casting, recording a process in Excel, for example, recording a Teams session is available and easy to use. Simply launch Teams, start a meeting without inviting anyone, and hit record. Your recording will be added to that Team's Stream page.
Asynchronous tools: Camtasia
Camtasia is a video screen-recording tool, excellent tool both for narrating slide shows and for walking your learners through any desktop activity. CETL uses Camtasia to record our instructional technology how-to videos. Editing presentations is a little more complicated in Camtasia than in PowerPoint -- adding or removing slides in particular is more difficult -- so our general recommendation is to use Camtasia if you want to show more than just a PowerPoint deck.
If you want to include testing in your video lectures and would prefer not to use Microsoft's streaming service, Camtasia files can be packaged and imported into Blackboard in such a way that embedded assessments will be included in the Grade Center.
In addition to screen recording, Camtasia is also an excellent, relatively simple-to-use video editor, so if you plan to use another option to record your presentation (recording with the camera on your phone, for example) or mix slides with other media, Camtasia is a good tool to consider. If you'd like, CETL will help you produce your Camtasia recordings and post them to your Blackboard course site for you.
Asynchronous tools: Audacity
So far, we've discussed tools that incorporate audio and video. If students can get what they need from your presentation without a visual component, Audiacity is an excellent free tool for recording audio only.
Some Detroit Mercy faculty have had great success dictating comments on student work using Audacity. Students report that having an audio file to listen to as they look over their graded assignments gives them the feeling of a face-to-face meeting with their professor.
Other faculty have found that using Audicity is an excellent way to introduce students to new modules in a course or summarize recently concluded modules. The audio-only nature means the process is much lower impact / pressure / prep than a fuller presentation that includes a visual component.
Asynchronous tools: Collaborate Ultra
While Collaborate Ultra is primarily a synchronous tool, its session-recording functionality makes it a decent substitute for PowerPoint or Camtasia in a pinch. Collaborate sessions don't copy between courses as easily as the above solutions, making it more of an ad hoc solution than something to be relied on for planned course development.